Class Acts: Derrida on the Public Stage

By Michael Naas

Class Acts examines two often neglected aspects of Jacques Derrida’s work as a philosopher, his public presentations at lectures and conferences and his teaching, along with the question of the “speech act” that links them. What, Michael Naas asks, is one doing when one speaks in public in these ways?

The book follows Derrida’s itinerary with regard to speech act theory across three public lectures, from 1971 to 1997, all given, for reasons the book seeks to explain, in Montreal. In these lectures, Derrida elaborated his critique of J. L. Austin and his own subsequent redefinition of speech act theory. The book then gives an overview of Derrida’s teaching career and his famous “seminar” presentations, along with his own explicit reflections on pedagogy and educational institutions beginning in the mid-1970s. Naas then shows through a reading of three recently published seminars—on life death, theory and practice, and forgiveness—just how Derrida the teacher interrogated and deployed speech act theory in his seminars. Whether in a conference hall or a classroom, Naas demonstrates, Derrida was always interested in the way spoken or written words might do more than simply communicate some meaning or intent but might give rise to something like an event. Class Acts bears witness to the possibility of such events in Derrida’s work as a pedagogue and a public intellectual.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Release date: Oct 5, 2021
• ISBN: 9780823298419

Michael Naas

Michael Naas is Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University in Chicago. His research covers the fields of philosophy and comparative literature, with a particular focus on ancient Greek thought and contemporary French philosophy and with a strong interest in the thinkers Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Lyotard, and Levinas. He has edited and co-translated into English a number of Jacques Derrida’s texts: The Work of Mourning (2011), Learning to Live Finally (2007), Rogues (2005), and Adieu: To Emmanuel Levinas (1999). His most recent publications are The End of the World and Other Teachable Moments: Jacques Derrida’s Final Seminar (2015), Miracle and Machine: Jacques Derrida and the Two Sources of Religion, Science, and the Media (2012), and Plato and the Invention of Life (2018).

Book preview

Class Acts

Series Board

James Bernauer

Drucilla Cornell

Thomas R. Flynn

Kevin Hart

Richard Kearney

Jean-Luc Marion

Adriaan Peperzak

Thomas Sheehan

Hent de Vries

Merold Westphal

Michael Zimmerman

John D. Caputo, series editor

MICHAEL NAAS

Class Acts

Derrida on the Public Stage

Fordham University Press gratefully acknowledges financial assistance and support provided for the publication of this book by DePaul University.

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Printed in the United States of America

23  22  21      5  4  3  2  1

First edition

For Marine,

First in Paris, now in Septeuil,

always in a class of her own.

Contents

Abbreviations of Works Cited

Introduction: The Program

PART I: DERRIDA IN MONTREAL

(A PLAY IN THREE SPEECH ACTS)

Argument and Dramatis Personae

Act 1. The Context (1971)

Intermission 1: Glyph 1

Act 2. The Signature (1979)

Intermission 2: Glyph 2

Act 3. The Event (1997)

Encore: Cocoon

PART II: THE OPEN SEMINAR

The Counter-Program (Syllabus)

Class 1. Agrégations: The Chance of Life Death (1975–76)

Class 2. Education in Theory and Practice (1976–77)

Class 3. Grace and the Machine: Perjury and Pardon (1997–98)

Conclusion: Actes de naissance

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Abbreviations of Works Cited

Works by Jacques Derrida

All works subsequently cited with the English pagination followed by the French.

Other Works

Class Acts

Introduction: The Program

The life of a professional philosopher is, it is commonly thought, one of solitude, reflection, and introspection, a life of reading, writing, and thinking far from the public eye. Such a view is surely not incorrect. It is hard to imagine a philosopher who does not spend a good part of his or her day poring over a text trying to understand an argument, hunched over a keyboard trying to turn a phrase, or just looking out the window trying to put some order into his or her thoughts. But there are also philosophers who, in addition to this more private life, spend much of their time in public, before the public eye, teaching, lecturing, and speaking with students, or else giving papers and presentations at various universities, professional conferences, and public meetings. Jacques Derrida was one of those philosophers. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a more visible or more public philosopher, especially during the last three to four decades of his life.

This work aims to bear witness to these two aspects of Derrida’s work—his public presentations and his teaching—by focusing on some of the questions that link these two things, beginning with the question of the speech act, the question of just what one is doing when one speaks in public in this way. This is especially appropriate insofar as Derrida himself never ceased, in both of these settings, to interrogate this relationship between speech and act, words and deeds, language and action, the thought or ideas of a philosopher and the milieu or context in which those thoughts and ideas are communicated. Whether it was in the classroom or a conference hall, Derrida was always interested in the way in which spoken or written words might do more than simply communicate some meaning or intent but promise to give rise to something like an event. This is a book about the possibility of such events in Derrida’s work.

While traces of Derrida’s many public interventions or presentations, whether in France, the United States, or elsewhere throughout the world, have long been visible through Derrida’s published works, many of which were first presented in some kind of public forum, the full scope of his pedagogy is only now beginning to come into view. The publication of approximately ten of Derrida’s seminars over the course of the last fifteen years (there are more than thirty to come) has already given us a much better sense of Derrida’s practice of teaching, that is, his deep commitment to that other form of public presentation that is a course or a seminar. Already we are beginning to understand much better the way Derrida combined reflections on the philosophical topics under discussion with an interrogation of the approach being taken to consider them and the milieu or the context in which they were being pursued. In classical philosophical terms, we are beginning to understand the interest Derrida took in questions of pedagogy and of the public speech act in both theory and practice—and, of course, in the ways these two things overlap in both theory and practice.

Given this interest in the context for doing philosophy, it is hardly surprising that Derrida would eventually take up many of the questions that are central to speech act theory, questions about the way we use language not only to talk about the world and communicate with others within our world but also to do things or to bring things about within the world. Those are the very questions that John L. Austin had taken up in his seminal text of 1962 How to Do Things with Words.¹ Back in 1971, therefore, at a conference in Montreal, Derrida delivered Signature Event Context, an essay that would initiate his long engagement with speech act theory and, especially, with Austin. In that work, Derrida at once praises Austin for opening up an entirely new approach to language and yet criticizes some of the metaphysical assumptions behind that approach. Six years later, in the wake of a scathing critique of Derrida’s essay by the American philosopher John Searle, Derrida would take up speech act theory yet again in a long essay entitled Limited Inc a b c … In that essay, Derrida attempts both to respond to Searle’s criticism and to clarify and deepen his own reading of Austin.

This engagement with Austin in 1971 and with Searle in 1976 has long been known to readers and scholars of Derrida. But what has been much less known are all the ways in which Derrida would continue to use the language and raise the questions of speech act theory throughout his work, beginning with his frequent use of terms such as constative, performative, and use and mention, terms or distinctions borrowed from Austin and those who would follow him.² But well beyond a simple borrowing of terms, everything from Derrida’s analysis of the inauguration and legitimation of political institutions, his taking up of questions of law and sovereignty, of juridical performatives (in, for example, his texts on perjury and pardon and on human rights), his emphasis on an originary affirmation or performativity at the heart of all language (the yes, yes)—all these gestures and questions will have been informed by Derrida’s reading of Austin and motivated by the question of how we do things with words. It was this same rethinking of speech act theory that also informed and motivated some of Derrida’s most original reinterpretations of such classical philosophical problems as the relationship between possibility and impossibility, activity and passivity, essence and accident, and so on.

True to the work or to the event of deconstruction, that is, true to the way a deconstructive reading is essentially open, as it were, to the accidental encounter, Derrida’s work came to be indelibly marked by the works of speech act theory, and especially by the work of Austin, by the language and thought of this encounter, just as it came to be marked by the works of all those thinkers or texts that Derrida read closely. Whether we are considering the influence on Derrida’s philosophical vocabulary or his unique philosophical project, the work of Austin will have been an important, even a privileged site of deconstructive investigation, just as formative or decisive in some respects as the works of Plato, Rousseau, Hegel, Husserl, or Heidegger. And that would have been the case from 1971 right up until the end.

In The University Without Condition, a text first presented at Stanford University in April 1999, right at the same time Derrida was completing the second year of his seminar Perjury and Pardon in Paris, all the themes that will be at the center of this work—pedagogy, performativity, speech acts, context, the accident, the event, and so on—are brought together in a particularly precise and powerful way. Derrida there says in the context of a rethinking of the university:

One will therefore have to ask oneself what professing means. What is one doing when, performatively, one professes, but also when one exercises a profession, and singularly the profession of professor? I will thus rely often and at length on Austin’s now classic distinction between performative speech acts and constative speech acts. This distinction will have been a great event in this century—and it will first have been an academic event. It will have taken place in the university. (UWC 209/23–24)

Even if Derrida will go on here, as he did elsewhere, to criticize the terms in which the speech act has been traditionally understood and framed, beginning with Austin, he will never abandon the terms of speech act theory and will never cease to avow or, better, to profess his debt to them. In this work from 1999, Derrida makes quite explicit the connection between the work of the professor, the professing of the professor, in public, in the university, and speech act theory, the way in which, in both the classroom and in lecture halls or at conferences, which themselves often take place at universities, one does things with words in order to make things happen, that is, in order to produce something like an event. This is a book, as I suggested, about those events or about the possibility of such events, about those that will have taken place during Derrida’s lifetime but also, and perhaps especially, those that promise to take place beyond it.

Since this book revolves around Derrida’s appropriation and critique of traditional speech act theory from the early 1970s onward in both his public presentations and his seminars, that is, in his acts as both a public intellectual and a pedagogue or professor, it is divided into two distinct parts, each one a sort of prolonged speech act in its own right. The first part, under the pretext of a play in three acts, looks at three key moments in Derrida’s confrontation with and development of Austinian speech act theory, all three acts taking place, curiously, as if by accident, in Montreal, that is, all three based on public presentations in Montreal that were subsequently published. The first act in this play, titled Derrida in Montreal (A Play in Three Speech Acts), follows Derrida as he delivers in August 1971 in Montreal the above-mentioned Signature Event Context, the first and most decisive work on speech act theory in Derrida’s corpus. Particular attention is here paid to themes such as presence, intention, repetition, power, and the opposition between speech and writing, themes that are continuous with Derrida’s works prior to 1971 but that, in the context of a rethinking of speech act theory, begin to take on new forms and move in new directions.

The second act of this single play takes place some eight years later, in 1979, at a colloquium at the University of Montreal. It is there that Derrida delivers a lecture on Nietzsche and the question of the signature, and particularly the political implications of the signature, a lecture subsequently published as Otobiographies.³ After a brief intermission that considers Derrida’s return in 1977 in Limited Inc a b c … to the reading and critique of Austin that began in Signature Event Context, and that was the object of John Searle’s fiery criticism, the second act demonstrates how Derrida began using speech act theory in order to rethink the foundation of political and professional institutions (in Otobiographies but also in Declarations of Independence from three years earlier). As in the first act, questions of the speech act but also of the written act, of the signature, of context and translation, and, in this unique case, of the relationship between French, Quebecois French, and English will be front and center.

Finally, in the third act, we see Derrida, some eighteen years later, in April 1997, yet again in Montreal, speaking at the Canadian Center for Architecture, giving a series of improvised remarks that would later be published as A Certain Impossible Possibility of Saying the Event. We here see Derrida returning yet again to the question of the speech act, some twenty-six years after Signature Event Context, this time with a renewed emphasis on the event. We thus see how Derrida’s earlier appropriation of speech act theory eventually